Events

Good Reads

— In The Wall Street Journal, Burton Malkiel reviewsVirtual Competition, a book about the darker side of the algorithmic economy. The book describes the use of algorithms to support price discrimination and collusion; it closes with a discussion of potential approaches to regulation.

Fundamentals

Research

— Researchers at Numentapublish a paper that summarizes results of a study that compares the performance of an unsupervised neural net with four conventional methods for sequence learning. The four baseline methods are ARIMA, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Long-Short Term Memory (LTSM), and Echo State Networks (ESN). Trigger alert: there is math. Spoiler: Numenta’s method does well, which is why they published the article.

Applications

— In The Huffington Post, Sebastian Raschka discusses the impact of machine learning on healthcare. And Ben Newton of Sumo Logicdescribes how retailers use machine learning to predict demand on Black Friday.

— MIT Technology Review reports on a machine learning algorithm that can determine whether U.S. State Department secrets are properly classified. Too late for HRC, though.

— Insilico Medicine launches Aging.AI 2.0, a blood biochemistry predictor of human age the company developed with deep learning.

Companies

— GE buys Wise.io and Bit Stew Systems, as it builds out its Predix platform for industrial-strength machine learning.